A Great Day At Work, but WOW That Commute Sucked!

One day a week I commute to South San Francisco for work, and often times I’m fortunate enough to rideshare my way down (thanks Tony and Chris!). Today, since I was all the way down there anyway, I decided to take a detour to Burlingame. Who knew this minor decision would end with one of the worst commutes I’ve had in a while as the transit ghosts decided to make mayhem on Caltrain?
I figured I’d just take Caltrain home from downtown Burlingame, as I’ve done before, but while waiting for the train to show up, “Mason Powell” noted that the train should have already shown up. Eventually they started announcing delays, that got longer each time…and it was getting late! Eventually we saw the train arriving, very slowly, and with no lights on. This wasn’t looking good. Now, normally I’d be Twittering the heck out of this, or at least using my iPhone for its intended use – pure entertainment – but the stupid battery died early in the evening. Sigh.
As it turned out, the train had a serious mechanical failure, and there were no lights on anywhere on the train. Another was behind, and they planned to dump everyone off at Millbrae, and then have them board the second train, but I figured I’d just wait at Burlingame – it didn’t make sense to board, get off, and re-board in Millbrae.
Everything seemed to be fine (but VERY slow) and I figured nothing else could go wrong, but upon getting on the N, we had a hippie family get on with extremely loud children. Worse, the hippies were teaching their kids how to evade fares. How cute. By now what energy I had was long since drained by the endless waiting around, and I didn’t even have the energy to send bad vibes their way to upset their crystals.
The N didn’t disappoint and did plenty of long stops outside the tunnel, the usual stop-start-stop-start that makes the ride annoying, and a gang of hipsters took up all the senior citizen seats, but at least I got home.
Nothing’s perfect, and accidents happen, but when you’re ready to go home and spend a lot of time waiting around doing nothing because you don’t know when you’re going to get moving again is really annoying! Although I keep wondering if I took BART if the transit ghosts would have been causing trouble there too.